Who makes sure that YouTube is available? Google. And the recent YouTube “outage” proves that even Google can’t always make sure that it works constantly. Almost YouTube user has experienced one of their favorite videos no longer being accessible.

Frequently the removal is due to a copyright claim, and even Larry Lessig has faced a copyright claim leading to a video being removed from YouTube, despite fair use. All of us rely on YouTube to serve as an archive for videos, mostly because it is so easy to use.

One of the most important roles that YouTube serves is as a portal for government information. As Siva Vaidhyanathan said in 2009 in Talking Points Memo (though no longer available there!):

… there is no clear reason for the government to solidify YouTube’s market dominance. In fact, there is no reason why the GSO could not mandate that all federal agencies post their videos in open forms — accessible, repostable, and mashable — on their own sites.

Then We the People could repost them on YouTube with commentary and maybe some cartoon graphics mixed in. Better yet, because .gov can’t deal with the bandwidth demands of too many folks pulling down popular videos, the federal government should post open format video as bittorrent files.

Making the videos available was supposed to be part of an age of government transparency, but according to Christopher Grayling, the British Conservative Party politician who is the Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice, there is “a limit to how much you can put and keep on your website year after year” I’ma just going to let that stew for awhile. Has he never heard of archiving?

But who are Americans to critique? The Bush Administration version of the White House website is only available on archive.org — and the Obama administration switched over the website immediately with nary a link to the old version. But that is just how it is done with every switchover, because this is a political decision, not an archiving/public information decision.

While these UK videos are available elsewhere on UK Web Archive, a project run by the British Library to archive British websites, they weren’t available on archive.org. Because robot.txt. Yes, robot.txt was added to the new Conservative website so videos can’t even be archived. However, now due to publicity, it has been removed.

This is another example of why it is so important for government transparency for government information to truly be available to the public, in the United States, the UK, and beyond. We cannot rely on YouTube or political parties to make this important information available to us all.

The YouTube Music Awards are a great idea. While Spotify and Pandora gets most of the attention (and the scorn) when it comes to music discovery apps, lots of music fans go to YouTube first for music discovery and sharing. YouTube has created stars in Justin Bieber, Lana Del Rey and Macklemore (whether you actually think they deserve their stardom is another issue altogether) Thanks to YouTube/Google’s search algorithm and simple functionality it’s really hard to beat it as a music discovery tool, and YouTube taking advantage of that, as they should. By all accounts, the award show itself was a stilted mess and watched by less than 200,000 viewers. (Not a surprise; YouTube is too slow and clunky for streaming most of the time.) However, YouTube’s music awards notably acknowledge the importance of online culture as a driving force for the music industry, in ways that the industry itself can’t seem to wrap their heads around.

Particularly for fans of non-mainstream/Top 40/non-U.S/U.K. music genres, YouTube becomes a lifeline for new music discovery, and a source of community and conversation. I’m thinking of K-pop here, but also for a bunch of other genres like metal, EDM and Christian pop/rock. The comments here rival the volume of conversation on a fan blog or dedicated social community. And most importantly, YouTube’s conversation is fan-driven, and lacking in the gate-keeping and hierarchy of more traditional outlets. That freedom to discover, to communicate, to respond is what makes YouTube such a great forum for niche fans to connect and mobilize. And mobilize they do. Check out any YouTube posting for Girls Generation (or any K-Pop group, really) and you’ll see a global community of fans stumping for their beloved group in a variety of award categories. This happens with other fan communities, certainly, but because so much of that global fan conversation is focused on YouTube, it makes total sense that mobilizing fans would be easier for K-pop fans here.

And YouTube knows this, I think. YouTube can position itself to cater to these niche music fandoms in a way that other music discovery communities can’t do, because of the volume of conversation and interaction that only YouTube has right now. It’s one of the few environments where that holy grail of online culture – engagement – actually happens in one place, especially for niche fan communities that don’t have anywhere else to go, really. So if YouTube continues these awards, an “upset” like Girls Generation will more than likely happen again, and again, and again, until it’s less of an “upset” and more like the standard.

But the video-sharing social network also plays a different role: as the first point of pop culture reference for curious fans looking to catch up on a long-cancelled TV show or a band’s discography. Fans rely on YouTube for background on, say, a 70’s classic rock song played in Guitar Hero or finding where a an 80’s film reference is from on Family Guy. Check the comments of a YouTube video for Faith No More’s 1992 song Midlife Crisis, for example, and you’ll see comments like this from fans who weren’t even alive when the song came out:

In other cases, YouTube gives an opportunity for new fans of a “legacy” fandom to catch up on its history, or – in the case of cancelled (and possibly reborn) soap operas like All My Children – to reminisce about episodes in the past. Remember Leo and Greenlee? Hell yeah you do!

Many fans use YouTube to keep fandoms alive, while remaining one step ahead of YouTube’s Copyright Police. When the YouTube channel of popular fan-made parody show Yu-Gi-Oh! The Abridged Serieswas shut down by YouTube for copyright infringement, fans of the show took it upon themselves to re-upload the episodes and keep the show accessible.

YouTube seems like an unlikely location for an multimedia fandom encyclopedia, but it’s probably the only location where such a function is even possible online. Think about it: YouTube is currently the Internet’s second largest search engine – bigger than even Yahoo and Bing – and the Internet’s second most trafficked website. Not to mention, its interface makes for easy social sharing and embeds. The playlist functionality makes it easy for content uploaders to group and categorize videos. I’ve seen entire seasons of TV episodes, albums and more uploaded to YouTube playlists. And clever labeling of metadata makes it relatively easy to locate obscure content – if you know what you’re looking for.

It’s YouTube’s unique combination of platform functionality and social community that makes this, a tech startup probably couldn’t recreate this even if they tried – mostly because of the copyright headache involved, but also because YouTube’s got the algorithmic might of Google behind it. And while YouTube has longed struggled against its reputation as a copyright infringement gray area, YouTube is so popular and relied upon for that very reason. It’s the place to go when looking for an obscure TV or movie clip, or to verify the lyrics to a song or to see that buzzed about award show clip 20 minutes after it happens.

So is there a solution to this tension? Should there be a solution? I’m not sure. To take away YouTube’s function as a living multimedia archive would definitely take away a big part of what makes the Internet delightful, and indirectly helps content creators, I think, because it’s an easy way to attract new fans, especially for TV shows/films/musicians who aren’t currently in the public eye. Companies like Vevo and MovieClips.com have adopted a live-an-let-live approach to YouTube, by housing content there that’s also paired with ads. But fan communities are nimble, and the large ecosystem of uploaded, fan-curated content on YouTube has grown leaps and bounds over any content owner’s ability to police it all.

Last Sunday evening, I was settled on my couch, resigned to the fact that I was going to be watching YouTube videos of Dillinger Escape Plan and/or Bengal cats all night, until someone on Twitter posted that the American Music Awards were airing that evening.

I hadn’t watched the AMAs in well over a decade, but awards shows are always more entertaining with the Twitter-verse as a running, real-time commentary on award show fashion, performance gaffes and ridiculous acceptance speeches. So after reading a couple of snarky red carpet tweets, I tuned in.

Was it a great show? Eh, it was OK, the fun was being able to see the much talked about PSY/MC Hammer mashup in real time, and my appreciation of Pink increased thanks to her artful modern dance inspired performance.

The real entertainment, as far as I was concerned, was the conversation itself, the online community of fans and casual television viewers who share a live viewing experience, like a real-time office water cooler. My own Twitter conversation drew in friends that probably hadn’t intended on watching the show either. These days, the social backchannel has become a real hallmark of the viewer experience, particularly with live TV events. Twitter has long served as a weekly discussion forum for TV fans to chat, as fans of Breaking Bad, Walking Dead, and Scandal, etc. can attest to. And of course, sports fans routinely take to twitter to rant, cheer and comment on … well, whatever it is that happens during a sporting event.

And it’s live events in particular (sports, award shows, political events) that create a different kind of momentum on Twitter, one that’s based around experiencing an event and conversing in that moment, as we’ve seen from the Twitter interaction during the Olympics, the U.S. Presidential debates, the EURO games, and … even stuff like the AMAs.

In the case of the Olympics, Twitter’s impact was a double-edged sword; while many complained about NBC’s tape delay harshing their Olympic buzz, it appears that the early social media spoilers about Ryan Lochte and the “Fierce Five” of women’s gymnastics made viewers more interested in turning in during prime time: NBC boasted 35.6 million viewers for the first five days of the games. According to the Wall Street Journal, it was the highest rated non-U.S. Summer Olympics in 36 years. The AMAs didn’t quite fare so well this year, it was the lowest rated AMA’s in its history, and interestingly, I’ve read more articles and blogs assessing the Twitter response to the AMAs than about the show itself.

I think the uneasy alliance of social media and television has come a long way in the past couple of years – most savvy TV execs understand the influence of social media and general and Twitter in particular when it comes to gauging the tone and tenor of online social conversation.

BET is surprisingly, one of the best case studies in this area: their social strategy for the 11th annual BET awards involved everything from celebrity live-tweets to an on-screen integration of a Twitter live-stream into the show itself.

But we’re still not quite at the point where online community interaction is broadly seen as a natural extension of a TV fan’s experience, as opposed to a competition for their time. There’s certainly an argument for and against embracing this perspective, but the impact of social media is clear, and unlikely to go away any time soon.